China is waging cyber warfare on Britain. Even your laptop isn't safe

When one of Gordon Brown's advisers took a pretty Chinese girl to his Shanghai hotel room two years ago, he had no idea he was caught up in a classic spymaster's sting. In the Spectator this week, Fraser Nelson reminds us that the girl, who glided across a disco floor earlier that evening, was a honeytrap: "When he woke up, the bird had flown – and had taken his Blackberry with her, with all its various contact information."

That was January 2008. So I wonder how many times that snare was repeated during the Beijing Olympics later that year. Imagine: attractive spies, preying on hundreds of jaded, drunken spads who were on tour with their political bosses. A field day for the Ministry of State Security.

But the Chinese secret services are using much subtler methods, too. "We daren't even take our laptops into China," one FTSE100 banking director told Fraser. "They will swipe all the information at the airport." Even worse, they're carrying out most cyber attacks remotely, mining information that is stored on servers in the UK, from all over the world – making anything from the national grid to the banking system vulnerable. And each attack almost untraceable.

The question is: are we doing enough about it? "The most eloquent comment on the gap between what Britain can do and what it needs to do is that an extra £650 million is being spent on our cyber-defences," writes Fraser. But at the moment, the West's digital "firewalls" look like a "digital Maginot Line" – and the Chinese are carefully sneaking past.

More terrifying is that it's not just the Chinese. You'll remember the Royal Navy's PR website was hacked last month by an illiterate Romanian. Well, take that as an embarrassing but quite harmless example of this global threat. As the deputy US Defence Secretary, William J. Lynn III, reports in Foreign Affairs magazine: "Right now, more than 100 foreign intelligence organisations are trying to hack into the digital networks that undergird US military operations." The codename of one the first American counterattacks – "Operation Buckshot Yankee" – hints at the spread of the problem, and how many countries and organisations had to be hit back.

Machiavelli said that "surprise is the essential factor in victory". A lot of SIS work is about making sure that the British government does not face unwelcome surprises. And that some of our adversaries do.

The cyber war is now out in the open, but it's one that Fraser Nelson thinks we are losing. It's vital that the British secret services can get off the back foot quick enough to prevent a major breach – and that they have the resources to ensure that our enemies are surprised more often than we are. Otherwise, WikiLeaks will quickly start to look about as relevant as AskJeeves.com.